Day 285: Debugging My Morning Routine

personal

My dream morning routine:

  1. Wake up.
  2. Get out of bed.
  3. Wash up.
  4. Meditate.
  5. Drink water.
  6. Work out.
  7. Write in my journal.
  8. Write down the 3 -5 things I want to do today.
  9. Start doing them.

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to pull this off consistently, but whenever I do, the rest of the day is on EZ mode.

When do things usually go awry?

These days, I start going off-track really early — between steps 1 and 2. Instead of getting up, I end up lying in bed for 30 minutes or more, thinking in a half-asleep state about some Browserflow bug or feature that I worked on before going to sleep. By the time I get up, my mind has already shifted into wanting to work on it. So after wash up, instead of taking a slow and expansive approach to the day, I end up starting to work. At that point, it’s usually too late for the important but non-urgent things — meditation, working around, journaling, planning. I put them off while I move from task to task, telling myself that I’ll do them later in the day, and either eek them out at the end of the day or more likely, not do them at all. While throwing more hours at work feels productive, it’s not a great long-term strategy because it neglects self-care and high-level thinking and planning.

The failure sequence starts with lying in bed for too long after waking up, which leads to thinking about specific problems, which leads to working on those things rather than going through with the morning routine that I know would be much better for me. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

In order to break this failure sequence, I’ll make two tweaks and see how that goes:

  1. Get out of bed as soon as I wake up

  2. After meditating, immediately go downstairs to work out

    • I’ve often rationalized not working out in the morning because I didn’t want to wake up my housemates downstairs, but that often leads to not working out at all. Exercise outside if you have to!

Get out of bed.

Go downstairs.

Update (2:45am): Of course, the night I try to make these changes, I encounter a different failure mode entirely. I went to sleep at 11:30pm, but woke up at 2:30am without being able to fall back asleep quickly. It’s too early to get up and do my morning routine. Usually when this occurs, I lie in bed hoping to fall back asleep and then eventually get up when that doesn’t happen. And then when I fall back asleep and get up for real in the morning, I’m way too tired and my discipline is non-existent so I go off the rails from my desired morning routine pretty much immediately. Entirely possible that might happen this morning…